Hornets and Others

by Al Sarrantonio

  "Shit! Shit!" he said, fighting an uncontrollable chill, thrusting the vacuum head around the area and plugging it into the corner under the register as far as it would go.

  He heard the tap of insect bodies rushing up the vacuum's soft plastic accordion hose and into the wet-vac's drum.

  Another crawled out onto the rug from behind the printer stand, and he speared it, then put the nozzle back into the corner. He kept it there, feeling another tiny body sucked up into the machine, and then another.

  He gave up all thoughts of work, and fled the office; at the doorway he saw a feebly moving hornet on the rug by the sill, and mashed it with his foot, closing the door behind him.

  "Sounds weird enough, Mr. Kerlan, but they all sound weird to me. One time—"

  "Can you come today?" Peter said into the phone, cutting the beekeeper off before he went into yet another anecdote. "This infestation is in the place I work, and I need it taken care of."

  "Sure," the other said, slowly. "I suppose I can be there this afternoon. We'll take care of you."

  "I hope so," Kerlan said, slamming down the phone.

  He stole a glance into his office, opening the door a crack. By now all sorts of nightmares preyed on his mind: the room filled with flying insects; a swarm waiting for him, covering him as he opened the door—

  All inside seemed quiet; the casement window threw a rectangular shaft of light against the far wall's built-in bookcase.

  He opened the door wider, listening for buzzing.

  Maybe I wiped them out after all.

  His relief was short-lived; as he stepped toward his desk his foot covered three squirming hornet bodies, and he saw a few more scattered here and there, some unmoving, others moving as if drunk; there were three or four on the walls, also, and more, perhaps a dozen, covering the casement's window itself, silhouetted dots against the light.

  He reached for the wet/dry vac, recoiled as a hornet brushed his hand as it fell from the hose; others were crawling over the instrument's drum, one hiding coyly by one of the rolling wheels.

  Once again he fled, and closed the door.

  "What you've got there is a classic case of wall infestation," the bee-keeper, whose name was Floyd Willims, said. He looked like a beekeeper, was tall and thin-haired and preoccupied when he stepped from his dirty white van; and now even more so, dressed almost comically in a pith helmet whose brim was ringed with mosquito netting; from the back of his van he pulled a thick pair of rubber gloves from a soiled box. He held up the gloves for inspection. "Triple thickness," he said, almost proudly; "stingers can't get through." After retrieving a powder filled canister and what appeared to be a pump hose from the van, he turned back to Kerlan and said, "Proceed!"

  Kerlan had already showed him the corner of the house where the hornets had gained access; they returned to that spot now and the beekeeper knelt, put the thin end of the hose which led into the canister in the opening, and began to puff powder into it.

  "This'll kill 'em dead," he said. "Whichever ones return will carry the powder into the nest and spread it to the others."

  As if on cue, as the bee-keeper removed the hose from the opening a hornet alighted and crawled into it.

  "Now let's have a look at the nest," the bee-keeper said, heading for the house with Kerlan.

  They had already studied the office on the bee-keeper's arrival, and the bee-keeper had helped Kerlan move furniture so that the upper corner of the wall, behind which the bee-keeper said they would find the nest, was exposed; luckily, there would be access through a nearby panel, behind which the house's electrical box was located. To either side of the box was packed insulation, which the bee-keeper began to remove.

  The smell of insect spray became stronger in the room.

  The bee-keeper lay the strips of insulation on the floor; Kerlan was repulsed to see hornets crawling feebly over the pink spun glass fibers of its back.

  The bee-keeper held up a strip, examined the five hornets on it carefully.

  "You zapped them pretty good with that off-the-shelf stuff you sprayed into the nest yesterday," he said. "If you'd gotten them at dusk, when they were all in the nest, you might have killed them all. What we're looking at are the dregs, I think."

  "How did they get in here to begin with? How many openings does the nest have?"

  Willims had shown him a picture of a typical paper hornet's nest; a nearly round structure with a single opening, usually at the bottom.

  "They either made another exit, or left an opening near the top," he said. "This isn't quite a typical nest. They were drawn to the light in your office." He pointed to the baseboard, the corner of the floor where the heat register butted the wall. "There's an opening down there, I'm sure. Doesn't take much, just a quarter inch." He squinted through his mosquito netting at the molding along the rug where the printer stand had been before they moved it. "There may be others. Like I said, a quarter inch is all they need."

  An involuntary chill washed over Kerlan as a hornet crawled onto the bee-keeper's glove and onto his shirt sleeve. The bee-keeper regarded it for a moment and then flicked it to the floor. "Like I said, you must have hit them good. if they were healthy they'd be all over us, because of the light." He turned to Kerlan as if having a sudden thought. "Sure you don't want to leave?"

  "I'll stay, if you think it's safe."

  The bee-keeper laughed. "Safe enough. If they pour out of the walls when I remove the rest of this insulation, I'll yell and you can run."

  Kerlan's eyes enlarged in alarm but the bee-keeper added, "Not likely to happen."

  At that moment the bee-keeper pulled the last strip of insulation out with a grunt.

  Nothing happened; the bee-keeper angled his head, aiming a flashlight up into the exposed cavity, and called back, "Yeah, you hit 'em pretty good."

  Kerlan leaned over, trying to see; pulled back and a fist-shaped clutch of dead hornets fell from the space between the open cavity and the bee-keeper's body.

  The bee-keeper angled his arm up into the cavity.

  "I'll. . .get it out if I can—"

  He pulled a huge chunk of dark papery gray material out of the cavity, let it drop to the floor.

  "Nest," he said in explanation. It was followed by a bigger chunk, mottled and round on the inside; within it's crushed interior were dead hornets and a few feebly live ones.

  "Ugh," Kerlan said.

  "Pretty big nest," the bee-keeper said, continuing to pull sections of the structure out. Mixed with the leavings now were the familiar honeycombed sections that Kerlan knew contained the pupae. Most but not all were empty. "About the size of a soccer ball. They built it right up in the corner beneath the floor above. As they built the nest it forced the insulation back. Amazing critters."

  He continued his work, and Kerlan shivered.

  An hour later the office was more or less back to normal, and Kerlan was writing the bee-keeper a check.

  "You'll want to caulk that hole they used in a couple of weeks," Willims said. "That powder I sprayed around it will take care of any stragglers."

  "Why not plug it now?"

  "Well, you could, but there could still be a few females outside the nest; they'd just start another one."

  Kerlan had forgotten that each nest held a queen.

  "Didn't we kill off this nest's queen?"

  "You can be pretty much certain of that. But even so, any female can become a queen. They'll just start another nest." He grinned. "Summer's not quite over, you know. I'll be getting calls like yours 'till mid-November, if the heat holds out."

  "Christ."

  The bee-keeper folded the check and turned toward his dirty white van. Kerlan had a sudden thought.

  "You're sure my nest is dead?"

  The bee-keeper shrugged. "Pretty sure. You may see a few strays wander out of your baseboard gaps looking for light, but believe me, that nest is dead. Only other problem you could have is if two females got in there originally and the second one started
another nest somewhere else inside the wall, farther down." Seeing Kerlan's eyes widen he laughed. "Not likely that happened, though. Plug the gaps in the baseboard if you can; you can use a wad of scrunched up cellophane tape. Call me if you have any more problems."

  Kerlan nodded as the van drove off.

  A single yellow-jacket brushed by his face as he entered the house.

  The next morning he entered his office to work. The evening before, he had moved along the edge of the baseboard where he could get at it, pushing cellophane tape into anything that looked like an opening. By the baseboard he had found a huge hole surrounding the heat pipe which let into the register; around it were tens of dead yellow jackets and a very alive spider as big as a thumb nail, feeding on them.

  There was a sour smell emanating from the vent; a mixture of fading bug spray and the strong damp smell from the cavity behind. After recoiling he cleaned the area out with the wet/dry vac and then plugged it with insulating material. The smell receded.

  He vacuumed the rug thoroughly, sucking up dead hornet bodies, and then replaced his furniture and turned on his computer.

  There came a tapping at the casement window above him and he started, looking up. It was just a fat bumblebee, probably the same from the other day, which ambled sluggishly off.

  He let out a deep breath and turned to the screen.

  He typed out the words Sam Hain and the Halloween that Almost Wasn't and suddenly, for the next hours, he was lost in the characters as words poured out of him in a torrent. Nothing like this had happened to him in the last twenty years. Page after page scrolled down the screen, and he knew they were all good. He finished one story and the ideas for two others came into his head unbidden. He typed so fast his fingers began to ache—something he hadn't felt since the days of electric typewriters, when the constant kickback of the keys would rattle his knuckles and literally make his fingers sore. It was a marvelous feeling. And still he wrote on, completing outlines for two more stories before finally letting himself fall back into his swivel chair, breathing hard. It was as if he had run a marathon, and he couldn't believe the mass of material now stored on his hard disk.

  Without thinking, he sent it all as an attached file to Bill Revel!, with a curt note: "Like I said, do whatever the hell you want."

  He knew that would keep the bastard busy for a while, and off his back.

  Even now, he felt another itch at the back of his brain, which would turn into more work tomorrow. He knew it. It had been so long since this had happened to him, this creative torrent, that he'd forgotten what it was like.

  Oh, Ginny, if only you were here now! The problem's gone! I can write again!

  It was the only sour note in what had been a marvelous day. He looked up at his casement window and saw that night had fallen, and that a waxing moon was rising. It looked huge and orange-tinged, and even that gave him a new idea for a story: Sam and Holly and the Halloween Moon.

  Quickly he wrote it down in outline, and when he looked up again the moon was high and the clock said it was midnight.

  He stumbled upstairs, past Ginny's things, and walked down the hall to bed, where he dreamed of black and orange things, and a cute character named Sam Ham, a squat fellow that looked like a comical skeleton with a wide happy grin and a spring in his step, who danced through a children's Halloween world with his blonde-curled friend Holly. It was a world of orange and yellow and red, of perpetually falling leaves that danced and dervished, and trick or treat bags that were always open and bottomless, and Jack o'lanterns that never sputtered or grew burned black inside or soft rotten, and winds that were blustery and just cold, and the clouds that made the fat full moon wink, and a night that was always All Hallows Eve, with hoots in the air, and scary costumes that weren't really scary at all

  and in the dream Sam Hain changed, even as the night changed, as he grew from a fat happy children's character into a monstrous terrifying thing, black and tall and cold as space, his bone hands bone white and hard as smooth stones, his eyes deeper than black empty wells, his grin not happy but ravenous, his breath ancient and colder than space, and sour with death as he bent to whisper into Kerlan's ear something soft and horrible, and which made him scream even as it filled him with joy—

  Two days, it said. You'll see her in two days.

  He awoke, covered in sweat, with the moon higher than his window and the night suddenly chilly, and for a moment he thought he saw something that looked like Ginny lying on the bed next to him, something which turned to writhing tiny balls of dust and then vanished.

  He sat up in bed breathing heavily, drenched in cold sweat, eyes wide with fear, and then he lay down again, and the room grew warm, and he slept again, dreamless.

  The next day he sat in front of his screen again, oblivious, until a sound, a tiny insistent buzzing, made him look up.

  He already had outlines for two more Sam Hain stories, and was in the middle of a third. Groggily, he glanced up at his window and saw a hornet buzz by outside the screen.

  He went back to work, but the tiny insistent buzzing remained. It was like an itch at the back of his mind.

  If anything, the weather had grown even hotter. The radio, which he had listened to briefly while making coffee, mentioned a record-breaker of eighty-two degrees for this date, October 30th. The leaves on the front lawn were wilting, turning dry and crackly like they normally did in deep winter. The Meyer kids, he barely noticed, were now all in shorts and short-sleeve shirts.

  As he worked, the faint buzz remained, but he tuned it out, and kept tapping at the keys.

  Sometime in early afternoon, after ignoring two phone calls, he hit a lull and reached blindly for the phone when it rang again.

  "Yes?" he said curtly.

  There was a slight pause, and then a voice said: "Mr. Kerlan? This is Detective Grant."

  For a moment that meant nothing to him, but then he focused on the name.

  "Are you there, Mr. Kerlan?" the detective asked.

  "Yes, I'm here."

  "I was wondering if you've heard from your wife."

  He remembered the dream from the night before. "Have you heard from her?" he said with hope.

  Again a pause. "No, I haven't. Frankly, I don't see why I would. I'm just checking in to see if by any chance she made contact with you, or anyone else you know."

  "I haven't heard from her."

  "That's too bad." Another pause, which Kerlan waited patiently through.

  "Mr. Kerlan, do you mind if I ask you a few more questions?" Peter's attention now was on everything Grant said. His hands left the keyboard reluctantly. "Sure, go ahead."

  "Thank you. I was.. .wondering if perhaps your wife had gone to.. . someone other than a family member?"

  "Like who?"

  "Someone...perhaps she was..." Grant laughed with slight embarrassment. "I don't know quite how to say this, except to just say it." Peter waited.

  "Mr. Kerlan, was your wife having an affair?"

  He instantly thought of Revell.

  "Who told you that?"

  "Well.. .1 shouldn't say this, but one of her relatives told me that there had been some. . . friction between your wife and yourself lately over the question of her, perhaps, seeing someone else..."

  A kind of relief flooded through him; he'd thought perhaps the detective had dug up facts when, in fact, he had obviously been talking to Ginny's big mouthed sister, who would have known about their problems.

  "Did Ginny's sister Anna tell you that?"

  Grant said, "Well..."

  "If she did, there's nothing to it. I had a fit of jealousy but there was nothing behind it."

  "That's what your agent said when I talked to him, but you never know with these things. People try to.. .keep things quiet sometimes..."

  "Revell."

  "Yes, William Revell. So as far as you know your wife wasn't having an affair with Mr. Revell?"

  "Absolutely not."

  "But you did think she was, for
a time."

  "For a brief time, yes. I was wrong."

  "Jealousy, you said..." Grant replied, and Peter could picture the man consulting his cursed note pad, flipping pages...

  "Is there anything else, detective? I'm busy—"

  "Just a few more questions. Unless you'd like me to drop by later..."

  Peter sighed. "That's all right. I'll answer whatever you want now."

  "Thank you for taking the time, Mr. Kerlan. Now..."

  Peter could hear the rustling of notebook pages. He waited.

  Grant finally said, "Ah. What I wanted to know was, if it's possible, I mean, could it be possible, that your wife is not missing, but has been murdered?"

  Peter's vision went black for a moment. "What?"

  "What I mean is," Grant said, in the same casual tone, "do you think it's possible?"

  "Murdered? By whom?"

  "That's the question, isn't it? But what we've got here, Mr. Kerlan, is a woman who threatened to run away, who may have had an affair, and, when she did finally leave, did not go anywhere logical, to family or friend, or even to the man with whom she may have been having an affair—"

  "I told you, there was no affair. You talked with Revell, didn't you say?"

  "Oh, yes, he was very helpful. Told me just what you're telling me now. But what I'm thinking is that, if there was the perception of an affair, even for a time..."

  "Detective Grant, I may be dense but I'm not that dense. Are you telling me you think I killed my wife?"

  "Not at all!" Grant gave a falsely hearty laugh. "Did I say that?"

  "Not in so many words. But the way you're talking..."

  Another pause. "Let me put it this way, Mr. Kerlan. Usually when we have this kind of situation, a missing person the way we have here, a few logical possibilities present themselves. The most logical in this case is that your wife left, and went to someone close to her. That hasn't happened. Another logical possibility is that she took off on a whim, and went to a faraway place, on an airplane, perhaps, or a train or bus. Since she didn't take her car, this is the way we think. We've checked on this end as far as we could, and that doesn't seem to have happened. And if it had, usually after two or three days she would have contacted you, or one of the other people close to her, to talk or just to let someone know she was all right. This is the kind of logic we use. After those two scenarios are excluded, there's another which often presents itself. That is, of course, that she never left at all. That she was..."